The modern-day hashtag has come a long way. From its birth name, the octothorpe, to being called the pound symbol used when dialing phone numbers to now being referred to as a hashtag, used to categorize topics on social media, that little symbol has been through a lot.
The hashtag first showed up online in the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) application in 1988. In IRC, users could discuss specific topics in channels marked with hashtags. For example, if you wanted to talk about flowers for your yard, you would join the channel “#gardens.” Pretty straightforward, right?
Well, in August 2007, Twitter user and social media expert Chris Messina changed the history of digital marketing with a single tweet.
Not long after Messina’s now-famous tweet, hashtags started popping up across Twitter and their official use was instituted by the company in 2009. Other social media platforms noticed and soon adopted the hashtag as well.
Do They Drive Engagement?
Today, from a digital marketing perspective, how do they help? Hashtags boost engagement by connecting consumers directly to brands. On Instagram, they help categorize and organize the content shared by the platform’s 1 billion active monthly users. Users can search for a specific hashtag on all social media platforms, and on Instagram and LinkedIn, they can also choose to “follow” a hashtag. This makes content from that hashtag appear in their newsfeed. So, whether they’re following or just searching, using hashtags that relate to your brand helps you reach consumers who might not have seen your brand’s content otherwise.
Helpful Hashtags
Many people use generic, extremely popular hashtags and while they may boost engagement, they don’t have the same impact for brands who want an authentic audience. You also have to remember that the more popular a hashtag is, the more competition there is. Using hashtags relevant to your brand and industry not only helps you cut down on the number of competitors, but can also help you receive the engagement that you’re hoping for, from the right people. But make sure that the hashtags you’re using aren’t so specific that people never search for them.
It may seem tricky to find the right hashtags to boost your brand’s engagement, but don’t give up on them! Posts without hashtags are almost undiscoverable to people who aren’t following your account. Research from Agorapulse showed that posts containing a single hashtag received 70% more engagement than posts without any. Now that doesn’t mean the more hashtags a post contains, the more engagement it will receive. A recent study showed that out of 150k posts, the ones with seven relevant hashtags performed better than all the others by 23%.
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